Driven by Purpose,
UCSB Arts & Lectures
Has a New Vision at the Helm
Meghan Bush Debuts Her First
Fully Programmed Season This Month
By Leslie Dinaberg | September 17, 2026
Read more of our 2026 Fall Arts Preview here.
While Meghan Bush has been making her mark on UCSB Arts & Lectures (A&L) in various capacities for more than two decades, the upcoming 2026-27 season is the first with her in the executive director driver’s seat, and the view from the top is pretty great. We recently sat down in her office to talk about the upcoming season, the cultural arts landscape, and more. Here are some of the highlights of that conversation.
This is your first fully programmed season as executive director (after working with the now-retired Celesta M. Billeci since 2004). Does it feel different? Yes! I think my guiding principle was to keep the quality, the level of quality, 100 percent where it was, and then also to try and reach a little bit. I think we always need to reach beyond what we have done, what we have accomplished in the past. But within reason, because we’re already a really strong organization. So, we were listening to people. All the various stakeholders. Whether it was community members, donors, students, the campus — I was really trying to listen to what people felt was missing. And I think the feedback that I got was that the quality was great, the artists were great, but they wanted a little bit more variety and maybe less repeats.
Caitlin and I, because Caitlin [O’Hara, the associate executive director] is very much a partner in this process, we really tried to lean into freshening things up where we could. I’ll give an example of where we didn’t do that: the Ukulele Orchestra [Apr. 22, 2027]. That’s something that’s been here many times, but it’s also something that there’s a massive amount of enthusiasm for, and it’s very beloved. And people actually thanked me for bringing it back.
But there’s other artists that have been here a lot, and so we had to think about if we have this person coming back, and we’ve already featured them a significant number of times, what’s different this time, and what’s special about it? In the case of Jazz at Lincoln Center with Wynton Marsalis [Feb. 24, 2027], this is 100 percent the time to feature him because it’s his swan song year. He’s stepping down as artistic director, and so that’s never going to come again. … It’s almost like a tip of the hat to the legacy, and the number of times that he has been here, and how spoiled we are for having somebody of his caliber here time and again.
The other way that it’s special is, he’s going to play a piece that was fully commissioned by Arts and Lectures. It’s a brand-new piece that he’s writing on his way out that we got to support. So that’s an example of something that’s been here a lot that I think there’s a really good argument for why it should return.
That makes sense. But then there’s other speakers who weren’t really on our radar. … Speakers who hadn’t been here, who might not have been in our sights before. Scott Galloway [Sept. 25] is a very good example of somebody that I don’t think we would have necessarily programmed in the past because he’s a little edgy. Similarly, his podcast partner Kara Swisher [Apr. 8, 2027], the fact that we got the opportunity to do both of them, I think in the past it might have been an either/or, but we were able to recognize they can address very different topics, and we put them on opposite ends of the season.
Some of the edgier, more interesting projects, like the tribute to Sinéad O’Connor [Jan. 20, 2027] by a New York choreographer — Sonya Tayeh — who’s very up and coming, that’s a piece that is very unique to a moment in time and is not going to happen again. It’s not a choreographer that we featured before. It’s not music that we featured in any way before.
Hilary Hahn, the violinist, coming with a piece that we’re co-commissioning from this very exciting composer Reena Esmail [Dec. 2]. I don’t know why Hilary Hahn hasn’t been on our series before, but I know she hasn’t. I know she has an exciting project, so let’s pick that up because that’s something that’s 100 percent at the quality level that Arts & Lectures demands, but it’s an artist that we haven’t engaged with before.
There’s a lot of examples of that, and then there’s definitely examples of things where it’s like we’ve definitely had Chris Thile and Punch Brothers [Oct. 7], but we also know it’s always a good time and the quality is good, so trying to strike that balance.
I completely understand that. You just highlighted a bunch of things, but is there anything else that really stands out that you’re excited about? I think Bernadette Peters [Oct. 15]. My background is in theater. And so, Bernadette Peters is a monumental figure. She’s a household name, and I’ve watched her since I was a little kid and I laughed at The Jerk. And then I saw her — she’s this amazing Broadway star; I think I’ve been following her my whole life. So, getting to have her here on the series is really special for me.
But I also like introducing new artists to the community. One that I saw immediately and was like, “We have to have him,” is this guy Nemanja Radulović [Nov. 4]. He’s one of those artists who’s so passionate that he sometimes knocks the microphone over, you know. But he’s got this French Serbian background, but he’s playing Vivaldi, which is something that is so accessible to everybody, and it’s such fundamentally happy music, but then he’s also playing French Serbian folk tunes. Very lofty, complicated pieces, and then playing folk music, and he’s got this amazing band of French Serbian musicians who are all going to play this classical music, but in this very sort of funky way. … So that’s the kind of artist that I’m like, “Let’s bring this artist that Santa Barbara has never been able to experience here.”
Arts and culture is such a big bucket. How do you keep up with everything that you need to keep up with just to even know that this would be great to bring to Santa Barbara? That’s the greatest challenge. But that’s also why we do this as a team. So, Caitlin and I work very closely. She primarily keeps her eyes on lectures and pop culture, and I primarily keep my eye on performing arts. So, things like dance, classical music, etc., but there is a ton of crossover in knowledge. Then we also have a third staff person who’s literally just our logistics person who’s tracking things like, do we have the venue that day. … We’re constantly listening to the news, reading the news. We’re constantly looking at social media feeds. … We take in all the media all the time. I scan every issue of The New Yorker. I look at what our colleagues are doing at Aspen Ideas Festival, at Portland Arts and Lectures, Seattle Arts and Lectures, University of Michigan, my partner UCs — we’re just constantly looking at media and what is on the market, and then obviously the news cycle. And then bringing it back to each other.
It’s a big job. Yes, but I love it.
Since you asked what performances I would highlight, and I’m excited about, I would also make a plug for the Joffrey Ballet [Feb. 27-28, 2027] because the quality will be 120 percent of what any dance company could bring you, but they don’t just come and do a couple performances. They come and they spend the entire week here. So, they will come and they’ll do two public performances, but they’ll also do a bunch of K through 12 outreach events and assemblies. They’ll teach three classes at UCSB. They’re going to teach two community classes. One of the cooler things they’re going to do is they have a program called Dancing with Parkinson’s, a movement class for people with Parkinson’s.
That’s awesome. They will do a full sort of community penetration while they’re here. It’s not a dog-and-pony show. It’s not like come in, look at the beautiful ballerinas, and ship them away. They will come and be fully immersed here for like a week doing all kinds of activities.
That’s wonderful. And you don’t always get to do that with one of the world’s best ballet companies.
That’s one of the things that intrigues me the most about Arts and Lectures is in addition to being able to obviously go to all these great performances, is that you’re doing so much more. Yeah, that it’s not necessarily the stuff that gets the focus, which is okay because it’s sort of supposed to be for those people, so those people in that Parkinson’s class. This is for them. It’s not for everybody else.
But if you’ve been to those things, you know. If you’ve been the parent whose kid went to this amazing assembly or got to shake the hand of whoever, that has sort of a snowball effect. I hope so. You hope that that kid comes and Wynton is going to do a lesson, and if you’re that kid who’s like, “Hey, Mom, I want to play trumpet,” or “I just want to learn an instrument” because they happened to have that experience that day. That’s the point of doing it. Even if they don’t want to play an instrument, now they know something about jazz.
Absolutely. It’s so cool for them to have that exposure. I think that’s kind of our job is to make sure that every kid gets that exposure, and adults for that matter.
Is there anything else you want to make sure people know about? A big part of what we do is education outreach. … Almost every single person that comes through A&L, and I can’t say everyone, because some of them, their schedule just won’t permit. But almost every single person who comes through has some sort of connection with our community, whether it’s kids in K through 12, UCSB students, our adult lifelong learning program, they have some touchpoint beyond just coming in, performing, packing up, and leaving. And I think not everybody realizes that there’s more that happens behind the scenes, and that’s a big part of our mission is to make sure that it’s not a one-off. That if they’re here, there’s some added value that’s going to occur as a result of them being here.
I think the other thing is we’re completely a community-supported program. I so appreciate when people buy tickets, but I don’t know if when they buy the tickets, they realize that that ticket only covers about 50 percent of the actual cost of the seat that they’re sitting in, and that the other half has been covered most likely by philanthropy. So, I would make the sort of generic gifts of all sizes make a difference plug, in the nicest possible way.
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